Daily Funding Roundup

Daily funding roundup - November 2, 2015

Handy raised $50M; Clearsky Data scored $27M; Confer secured $17M

Twigly, a Gurgaon, India-based curated food marketplace, raised $200,000 in seed funding. Backers included Tracxn Labs and angels Amit Gupta, Aloke Bajpai, Ashish Kumar, and others. The company will use the funds to expand operations. Led by Sonal Minhas, Twigly operates a marketplace built around chefs who prepare recipes to be cooked hygienically and quickly and delivered fresh.

ingage, a London, UK-based investor relations company, raised £1.1 million in its third equity financing. The backers remained undisclosed. The company, which has raised £3 million in total equity capital to date, intends to use the funds to increase R&D spend. Led by Michael Hufton, Founder & Managing Director, ingage has developed a platform for arranging corporate access, which fully complies with FCA regulations regarding the use of client commissions.

London-based start-up Vinaya, formerly called Kovert Designs, has raised $3 million in a seed round of funding from a group of investors, including early Net-a-Porter investor Carmen Busquets, Playfair Capital, Local Globe, attorney Ken Hertz and Decoded Fashion's Liz Bacelar. Vinaya, which describes itself as "a research and design house creating lifestyle-enhancing technology products," has just launched its first product, Altrius, a collection of Bluetooth-enabled rings, bracelets and jewelry. Paired with the Altrius iOS app, the collection allows users to prioritize e-mails, messages and calls.

Rocket Internet-backed Dutch-German startup Nestpickhas received $11 million (€9,9M) to digitize the entire rental process of homes. The series A funding comes from VC’s Rocket, Mangrove and Enern. Started in Rotterdam as a service for international students and expats, Nestpick now is for just anybody looking to find rental space. It also offers landlords an efficient and hassle-free renting process.

After spending the past six years scavenging for lab equipment and operating on a shoestring, San Diego’s Crinetics Pharmaceuticals has finally landed its first round of institutional funding. The startup, which is developing new oral drugs for treating an array of endocrine disorders, said today it has raised a $40 million Series A financing led by 5AM Ventures, Versant Ventures, and Vivo Capital. Crinetics plans to use the proceeds mostly to advance its lead drug candidate, a small molecule agonist targeting the receptor for somatostatin, a regulatory hormone that inhibits the secretion of growth hormone. Crinetics wants to carry out clinical proof-of-concept trials of the drug as a new treatment for neuroendocrine tumors and acromegaly, a rare disorder caused by excess growth hormone production that affects at least 20,000 people in the United States.

AppDynamics Inc., whose software monitors how applications are performing in order to help companies avoid bottlenecks, has raised $120 million in equity and debt at a valuation of more than $1 billion, the company told VentureWire. AppDynamics Chief Executive Jyoti Bansal AppDynamics The funding comes as AppDynamics prepares for an eventual IPO and continues its legal battle against competitor CA Inc., where AppDynamics founder and Chief Executive Jyoti Bansal and other AppDynamics executives previously worked. CA on Monday filed the latest salvo in what has become a series of lawsuits, which started when CA sued AppDynamics for patent infringement in federal court in New York last year.

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